


trembling before the machinery of other skeletons

by youremyqueen



Category: Death Note (Anime & Manga), Death Note: Another Note
Genre: 5 Times, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Kissing, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-14
Updated: 2017-08-14
Packaged: 2018-12-15 07:55:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11801733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youremyqueen/pseuds/youremyqueen
Summary: Five kisses for Beyond Birthday.





	trembling before the machinery of other skeletons

**Author's Note:**

> i live a “let beyond birthday be kissed” life. this is mostly just a prose-style experimentation. it's probably the most canon-compliant b thing i've ever written but the b/naomi is still inexcusably au from labb. title from howl by allen ginsberg.

i.

 

Summer ticks away with gnarled clock-hands. A has patches of eczema in the creases of his elbows and knees and flushes dewy when B tickles the skin around them with his mouth. L is becoming Eraldo Coil in some other time zone, some other time loop, so out of sync with their world of spoiled picnics and graphite fingers that his calls wouldn’t connect even if he made them, which he does not. B tells himself that they won’t let him back in unless he says the magic words, but the pit of his stomach knows that: (1) L will never say the magic words, and (2) they will not be a _them_ by then.

B has been counting down to this day on this month of this year since he first saw A. It looms against the horizon, casting shadows. August is a send-off. August is last rites.

“Rope,” B repeats back at him, but it is not a question, he is not confused.

“Yeah,” A says, sitting up so that his bangs fall in his eyes, last winter’s chimney soot smudging his glasses. “Rope.”

B gets it for him, from the farmhouse seven miles up the road instead of the D & G Hardware in town, because things found and stolen are weightier and more real than things bought in stores. No matter how many times he explains this concept to A, he will never understand it. No matter how many orange evenings they spend on the rooftop, or mornings they wake with moth-eaten bedclothes kicked to their feet, arm-in-arm, lip to sternum, hand to ass—A will not stay.

“I hope they have autumn there,” B says, “and harpsichords and strip clubs and weed.”

A says, “Where?” because he cannot tell the truth the way the numbers do.

On the night before, B grips him by his broad, freckling shoulders and flutters his palms up his neck, along his jaw, touches his ears, presses their foreheads together and gives him one last fat and juicy taste of life on earth. Kisses him like he’s never kissed him, letting L disappear from the throne in his head for just long enough to apologize, with nibbling teeth, for the cards they were both dealt and the cards they both chose to play.

A kisses him back, pulls him in and swallows him, but, of course, no twist endings here. It’s not enough and it was never going to be. But he tells the truth at least, at last, with his hips and trembling hands. There’s so much truth they can hardly fit it all into one night. It spills over the edges, into the pale yellow morning, but when B comes up for air he is alone in A’s bedroom.

Roger finds him hanging in the attic. He can barely speak or stay standing, fingers shaking so badly that he drops the telephone twice as he dials it, so B is the one to cut him down, with a knife from the kitchen, fiber by delicate fiber.

September is a wake.

 

 

ii.

 

He sleeps in snowbanks, eats London smog, then spends half a year in Portugal on an expired visa, learning tricks from street magicians. When he returns it is not L's house anymore. New small feet bruise the floorboards. New degraded orphan children are given criminology texts books and inflated senses of self. A question is: how many A’s will there be this time around? A better question is: who will cut them down?

He haunts the property for two days before going inside, relearning the slopes of the hills and listening to the gossip of the crows, then washes in with the rain on a sour-mouth morning, floating through old passages, retracing the footsteps he left as a child. He is eighteen today.

L's room is full of relics, every triumph tacked up on the wall, every humiliation notched into the bed frame. He is not the only worshipper. A navy sleeping bag with a mop of blond hair breathes beside the desk, catching the gray dawn that slants in through the window. _Essay on the Theory of the Earth_ by Georges Cuvier is face down on the floor beside it, paperback spine lined with wear, a notebook beneath that, blue inked pen uncapped, flashlight shut off. Elements of the present piled haphazardly over someone else’s past.

B breathes in the attic dust and smells the best moments of his life: hands pushing, hands pulling, plain soap and red-bitten nail beds. They are encased here, insects under glass. He can pull them out and touch their wings.

He wonders what the child comes here to touch.

He creeps across the room and pulls back the flap of the sleeping bag, feels warm breath against his knuckles, sees the letters and numbers stark and red, spoiling the ending again.

"Mee-hale. Mee-hile." He tries out pronunciations. B for Back-up. M for Maybe this time it will work.

The child stirs but doesn't wake. B leans down and kisses him on the crown of his head, the chapped grooves of his lips passing on knowledge that he learned in a dream that he had a decade ago on this very floor, only under the bed instead of next to it.

“Take care, little brother."

He falls back out into the rain, lights a cigarette under an awning, and waits for the house to ask him how he's been.

 

 

iii.

 

B looks for and finds, in her taillights that he follows and her bathroom window that he jimmies open and the chafe of her denim thighs in his lap, the reason that they call her a massacre.

“Your boyfriend,” he breathes sticky against her mouth. “What’s his name again?”

The slap across the face is better than an answer, meatier and less discreet. It sends him rattling through time and space, into a burning apocalyptic future and then back again, onto her Ikea sofa with her knees on either side of him.

“I should call the cops on you,” she says, and grinds down, takes without asking. He gives without being asked.

“Should have called the cops the first time you saw me.”

“I thought you were L.”

“I am L. Part of him, anyway.”

To her that means something about division of labor, confirms a theory she maybe has, that everyone from prime ministers to malformed internet news leeches has had, that L is not a single individual but an organization, many mouths behind one modulated voice, many minds thinking many thoughts about many murders. Human beings will do anything to convince themselves that nothing is mysterious. B would like for Ms. Massacre to understand the length and verbosity of the riddle she is being told now and not later, because by the time they reach the question mark at the end, the answer will be doused is kerosene. Match kissing striker. Later is too late.

“Hit me again,” he says, and she does, with a palm that knows the grip of a pistol or six and a strong arm for strong-arming creeps like him face-forward onto floors and slapping, yeah slapping, cuffs on their wrists.

His cheek throbs with his cock. She looks like she can’t decide who she’s more disgusted with. L’s got to have her place wired up like a casino, watching with the fish-eyed fear of a scientist whose experiment has started to make hypotheses about him. Naomi was supposed to be a pawn but she moves in all directions. B is supposed to wait to eat the fire but he’s so goddamn hungry.

“You know more than you’re saying, Rue,” she breathes against his mouth and he says yes of course with his tongue pressed to the seam of her lips. This is a clue that he’s leaving for her. He slides it along the ridges of her gums and pushes it down her throat. She swallows a little bit of his spark and now even when the case is closed she’ll feel it burning in her belly.

She grabs him by his jaw and he hooks his thumbs through her belt loops. Check? Check? L, are you getting this?

Checkmate.

 

 

iv.

 

He’s moved to a padded room once he's well enough to speak, sit up, chew solid food, and wipe his own ass. The walls are white but at night they look blue. If he thrashes they put him in the straightjacket, and if he tries to spook them they jam his veins with benzodiazapines so he can only spook himself. He says _L Lawliet_ over and over again, very quietly, until his prayers are answered.

He's in the jacket today because they won't let him see anyone without it; not Naomi, who won’t come back even though he asks for her, and not his lawyer, who won’t stop coming even though he asks her not to. All visits take place in the cramped, camera-heavy room with the rickety table and the bare lightbulb. A guard is required to mill around the edges looking bored and despondent, hands fidgeting with his holster.

L walks into B's cell and the rules bend beneath him, protocol crumbling under his scuffed sneakers. They close the door behind him and lock it, and then it is only the two of them. B has sweat through this fantasy many times.

He expects accusations or insults. _Well, here I am. This is what you wanted, isn't it? This is what you burned off half your flesh for. Happy now?_

L says none of that, just kneels down in front of him and begins unbuckling the straps. B wheezes with the strain of smiling. The slope of L's nose casts a shadow across the left side of his face as the right side disappears into the fluorescents. B will never not be in love with him.

He does not shrug or shimmy out when the clasps are all unclasped but lets L undress him. This is a baptism. “Water," he says, but when L huffs and grabs the cup from this morning's tray of indedibles, complains, “That's not what I meant."

“Whatever. Drink it."

He doesn't hand it to B but pours it into his mouth, spilling half of it down his chest. White wet scrubs stick translucent to his skin and his ribcage sings like a xylophone.

“Kiss me," B says.

L takes the first order of his life.

The corner of B’s lip has not yet healed but the throb of pain only makes him open wider, saliva slicking his chin, L's cheek. It is chaste but inexcusably sloppy. It has been six years since they have touched skin, though their egos are riddled with scabs and nicks exchanged in the epistolary interim. Every slain monster is resurrected between their bodies. B cannot breathe so he takes L's breath and L lets him have it and it is not until they're both chafed and pooling blood downward on Newton's lesser known fourth law that he realizes that L did not come here to gloat or to belittle him, but to apologize.

His nasal cavity stings and his dick twitches. The air between them is humid with shame.

“I’m,”—

“You know that Billie Holiday song where she says, ‘Take my arms, I’ll never use them’?”

L blinks. “No."

“Geez. Would it kill you to get a little culture once in a while?”

“Some of us have jobs that allow us very little time to browse our prison's listening library."

“Ha. Like they let me roam around loose? They don't. I’ve forgotten what sunlight tastes like. But not you. You, I remembered. Mint and spiritual absence."

“Yes, that's what my brand of toothpaste is called."

B’s giggle morphs into a sob and then back again. Things tremble in the lines around L's mouth. His jaw is stronger than it was, hands bigger, psyche ripening with disgust for former versions of himself. B understands, but doesn’t commiserate. He feels tenderly towards the teenaged boy who left footprints on his spine, promised him that he would always be empty and never full, locked his bedroom door and cut down the branches by his window but didn't act surprised when B showed up in his bed anyway and sucked new patterns into his skin.

“Come closer," B says.

“Your wounds,” L says for no reason. He touches them, fingers grazing the bandages, rustling the nerves awake into terror.

“No, closer.”

“Any closer and my body will goes through yours."

B blinks _are you fucking new here or something_ at him. L rolls his eyes and comes closer, kisses him again, capillaries blooming and throat stuck with hot fear. B bites his lip with every row of teeth he has, cracking scabs and eating dead skin, rubbing every higher faculty fuzzy and red. If this is a goodbye it isn’t going well at all. If this is a hello, on the other hand, well then—

How do you do?

 

 

v.

 

The new world’s reaper, cloaked in slimming black and lugging around a farm tool, does not come for him. When Death arrives she’s fat with gristle, flowering with fungus, chicory, poppies and opiate odors, molds of varying shades and colors, baby’s breath and shasta daisies, singing odes to folk heroes, sword sheathed on her hip. Half her face is rotted, teeth to her ear, eyeless and crawling with larvae, and other half is so vast and holy he cannot see anything but her brown eyes and her secret-keeping grin.

B’s heart clenches, shoulders shatter-bright, body hot, limbs tingling, vomit heady and ready to go. Death takes his face in one hand warm and work-calloused and another skeletally brittle and kisses him on the lips. He kisses back.

This has never been one of his fears.

 

 

fin.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! any and all comments are appreciated.


End file.
